Dan Erwin

PENELOPE TRUNK ON MENTORING

I'm not certain that I should be writing this.  I'm really certain that some of my friends would scratch their head, and some of my critics would point their finger.  But. . . on occasion, I read Penelope Trunk, nee Adrienne GreenHeart.  I think, but am not sure, that a huge proportion of her readers are Gen-Y.  She's got me fooled, she's approximately 45 years old, writes especially for the Boston Globe and newspapers all over the world.

I doubt that anyone cares, but I've tracked my responses to her posts over the past five or six months.  Here's the self-talk in chronological order:

    "I don't believe I'm reading this."

    "I really don't believe I'm reading this."

    "I wouldn't want anyone in business, especially my exec friends, to know that I'm reading this."

    "She's going to write about that?"

    "Curious."

    "Hmmm...she really does write very well."

    "She really does know her stuff."

    "This one on mentoring is better than anything in Harvard Business Review or the business  books."      Penelope Trunk

My rationale is that I'm building traffic, and she has magnificent traffic (#45,643 in the web world today).

DOES WHO YOU KNOW AFFECT WHAT YOU DECIDE?

According to Rob Cross at U VA, the answer is a definite yes.  In an intriguing piece of research reported in the Sloan Management Review, he and colleagues focus on how informal networks affect the decisioning of leaders.  Two conclusions are very significant:

--Leaders often try to rectify inefficient and ineffective decision making by increasing collaboration.  Cross found that engineers and scientists looking for info were more than five times as likely to turn to friends or colleagues than to a different network or research.

--Leaders are often blind to the way their own informal network bias affects how they frame decisions.

Both of these conclusions also apply directly to career development.  When we have career questions regarding decisions who do we usually go to?  Our network of friends.  And networks have a high tendency to be composed of birds of a feather.  Social scientists have known for years that "who you know" has much to do with "what you know."  Big echo chamber.

That suggests that if we want to control our careers in a volatile environment, we'd better start looking beyond our friends.

HOW DO YOU STAY FOCUSED ON YOUR CAREER GOALS IN THIS TURMOIL?

It's an important question made especially difficult by the recession.  Tim Butler, from Harvard Business School, brings some smarts to the party as director of its career development program.  In this job climate it's easy to lose sight of your goals, but you can stay focused.

There are a number of issues that professionals should give some serious thought to today:

How far out should I be looking? 

According to Butler, if you've got a Master's of some sort under your belt, you should be looking out from five to seven years.  Well, maybe.  Even the best companies rarely give more than five years of thought to their strategic thinking.  A better focus is to think deeply about the next three years.  That means if you're in your twenties or thirties (and have a satisfactory position) you'll want to keep your actual responsibilities more congruent with your longer term vision.

How do you deal with career limitations placed on you by the recession? 

Most firms are saddling their employees with less flexibility and more work.  Complaining about it won't help.  Dig in, but keep your options open and your vision in front of you.  When you're given new responsibilities always ask yourself whether they might provide some unexpected opportunities.

How do you deal with these roadblocks?  A major benefit for keeping a strong career focus is that it's easier to find alternative routes when you're face-to-face with roadblocks.  Map them out in advance.  Keep that intelligence network up and running and conversing.  Talk to people that have significantly different values and outlook than you and your friends. 

It's not easy to stay focused in this economy, but make it an important personal objective.

Photo: Lauren Metcalfe

A WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMNIST GETS IT

Most of the Wall Street Journal columnists are predictably Republican and narrowly capitalist--except for Thomas Frank.   Usually this means that the nuances are ignored.  Each columnist goes for the prescribed weaknesses, dictated by the party.  Thankfully, the rules are ignored by a few and one of those, on a regular basis, is Peggy Noonan, President Reagan's speech writer.  Her insights are rarely, maybe never, constrained by the party establishment.  She could praise Bush for one thing and use a knife for another.  She can also do the same with Obama.

But what Noonan is especially good at is looking closely at "the facts on the ground," and chastising her own party elders--Gingrich and Limbaugh.  I'd appreciate more columnists engaging at that level. It makes for fun reading.  It also clarifies the political issues.  Here's Friday's Noonan (WSJ) column:

She (Judge Sonia Sotomayor) is of course a brilliant political pick—Hispanic when Republicans have trouble with Hispanics, a woman when they've had trouble with women. Her background (public housing, Nuyorican, Catholic school, Princeton, prominence) is as moving as Clarence Thomas's, and that is moving indeed. Politically she's like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die.

She also understands the English language.  Enjoy.

HOW TO LISTEN INTERPERSONALLY

Listening interpersonally is different than listening to a presentation.  You can ask your questions immediately, rather than waiting for the end of the presentation and hoping for an opportunity.  The personal and emotional investment in interpersonal listening is usually larger than in presentational listening.  Interpersonal conversations are composed of give and take, whereas presentations are all give, until the end of the speech/presentation.  Much of the time in a presentational setting, little response is required--or at least the response is shared by other members of the team or audience.  In effect, you're not nearly as much on the spot in a presentational setting as in an interpersonal.

Osmo Wiio's humorous law on communication applies directly to listening:  Listening usually fails, except by accident.  Communication between computers usually works quite well, but human communication uses vaguely defined symbols.  By their very essence, symbols are prone to misunderstanding.  You use a word (or an idea) thinking it has a specific meaning, but the recipient of your message applies a different meaning.  What's worse, without accurate listening skills, you usually have no way of knowing that.

The first step in in effective interpersonal communication is to understand the other person's symbols and ways of thinking.  (The second, of course, is to acquaint him/her with ours.)  A basic rule (I hate rules, but life won't work without them.) is that active listening demands that you attempt to understand another person's communication WITHOUT PASSING JUDGMENT ON WHAT IS BEING SAID.

A marketing manager and I created a simple acrostic for listening interpersonally.  Since then, I've seen it elsewhere and in print.  I guess that means we were really smart when we put it together.  My client likes acrostics. . . so I'll give him the bulk of the credit.  The Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible uses a number of acrostics but you can't recognize them without knowledge of Hebrew.  English writers from the 16th century on used them, as did Edgar Allen Poe.  You may remember that Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code was filled with mind-bending acrostic ciphers--letters used to hide messages.

 Acrostics can be very useful memory devices when they are readily associated with the desired subject.  Here's a great one for listening, easily associated with the act and more easily committed to memory: EARS.

--Explore the ideas of the other, asking questions of him/her, probing and searching to merely understand the terms and ideas.

--Accept the ideas as stated, and show this acceptance by restating, paraphrasing and summarizing.  

--Respond with yes, no, judgments or differences.

--Stimulate with ideas of your own.  This is the creative side of listening where you get your chance to take the conversation in whatever direction you wish.

Note that active listening involves hearing with our ears, but listening with our mind.  To a great degree, listening involves questioning.  Those are two reasons that listening is often very fatiguing.

P.S.  Here are several more posts on listening:  How to listen and not misunderstand, Listening successfully to non-verbal messages and  How to listen with your eyes

QUOTATION OF THE WEEK: DAVID BROOKS

The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood. It’s based on the falsehood that this is a nation of laws, not men; that in rendering decisions, disembodied, objective judges are able to put aside emotion and unruly passion and issue opinions on the basis of pure reason.

                                            -David Brooks, NYTimes

DOES IT PAY TO BE A NICE GUY?

Although research has been dealing with this question for nearly 50 years, it has only been in the last seven or eight years that the answer has become firmly established. Nice guys of both sexes, the kind of warm, friendly people you like to be around, have some of the stuff that makes for relationship success.  Evolutionary psychologists believe that "warmth" emerged as the attribute that helps us determine whether the other person is friend or foe, and whether or not we can trust them when our survival depends on it.  

"Do I like this guy?  Is he or she someone that I want to collaborate with--or buy from?"  It's a terrifically important issue for sales people whether they're involved in sales at lower levels or in highly complex strategic settings.  Furthermore, the answer to that question assumes a very high priority as employees at all levels are given team and project responsibilities or work in cross-disciplinary settings.  As they become the sole drivers for their own careers, needing mentors, and wanting new opportunities or support networks, they will find themselves ham-strung without a nice guy reputation. 

Indeed, as competition forces marketing and sales to assume a central role in even such professions as medicine, law and architecture, the answer to the question could very well deal with issues of career life or death. 

So, does it pay to be a nice guy?

Yes and no.  New data confirm that there are two universally important, required attributes of interpersonal success:  warmth and competence.  It appears that we start with moral intuitions, "nice-guyness," that our brains find evidence to support.  The research on nice-guyness as warmth captures the traits that are related to positive intentions such as friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness and morality.  

Although both warmth and competence consistently emerge as necessary conditions for successful relations, warmth is always judged before competence.  Nice-guyness carries a lot more weight.  That makes sense to an evolutionary psychologist because another person's intent for good or bad is a lot more important to survival than whether or not a person has the smarts to act on his intentions.  Not only do we make nice-guy judgments about someone first, we also make those judgments very rapidly.

To study competence, or smarts, the research included such topics as efficiency, respect, intelligence, skill and creativity.  In contrast to warmth, a person's competence takes quite a bit longer to figure out.  People also believe that a person who is competent might have occasions when he/she is not so competent--and that doesn't affect their basic belief in the competence of a person.    

So when people have have both "nice-guyness" and competence, they've set themselves up for a successful career.  If they have competence without being a nice-guy, that's liable not to work very well.  The studies reveal that such people eventually have trustworthiness problems.  After a few years in the market, most of us have met or worked with competent, but not nice-guys.  We often think of them as cold fish, stinkers who eventually get added to our list of jerks to avoid.  In contrast, people who are nice-guys but not competent don't get added to the jerk pile.  Instead, these warm people elicit pity and sympathy, making them subordinate in status.  Sometimes you have to work with a person who's warmly incompetent, but has vested power from the organization.  Eventually we may add that person to the jerk pile also.

So what does all this mean?

Well, first of all the issue is not how we see ourselves, but whether others see us as both warm and competent.  With issues of this much importance, you'll want to stay on top of feedback, and track the impression you're communicating.  Bob Sutton of Stanford provides a free ARSE test and it'll give you some immediate feedback on asshole behaviors, though I never fully trust self-reporting exams.  I took it recently and scored 2 out of 24 which means that I don't sound like a certified asshole unless I'm fooling myself.  Most consultants with any significant background or mentoring watch these issues like the plague.  Interpersonal failure means career failure.

What's very encouraging is that warmth and competency can be learned.  In other words, they're grown not born.  Warmth and competency are the underpinnings for the six relational skills that support nearly all business expertise.  As you check through my list, you can see that warmth and competence are of extremely high value.

• Proactive skills for seeking help.
• Ability to identify potential mentors and coaches.
• Capacity to initiate conversations with individuals who do not know you.
• Openness and skills for sharing your own experiences.
• Ability to establish relations of trust and respect.
• Skills for inviting feedback. 

So, does it pay to be a nice guy?  It certainly does if you're also competent.  But if not, you're liable to end up last.

P.S.  My post on the six relational skills can be found at Gen-Y Competencies: Six Relational Skills

IF YOU ASK FOR FEEDBACK, DOES IT MATTER HOW YOU'RE PERCEIVED?

Based on current research, the answer to the question is an obvious negative, indicative of the sea-change in employee relations.  Recent studies of successful CEOs by Kaplan and Klebanov (U Chicago) and Sorensen (Columbia U) show that executive skills are undervalued and interpersonal skills are overvalued.  In other words, what’s valuable at lower levels like personal warmth, listening skills, team building skills, enthusiasm and effective communication are not that important—for CEOs.  Instead, the study showed that what mattered for CEO success was attention to detail, organizational skills, doggedness and the ability to work long hours. 

Although HR, middle managers and lower level employees are often distraught by those facts, my consulting experience at senior levels of major organizations confirms the validity of those research conclusions. 

Admittedly, more than 99% of us will not become CEOs.  Successful project managers (the first step up from individual performers) need empathy, listening, extroversion and team skills, so don’t chicken out on those all important interpersonal skills.  Research shows that personal warmth and competency are viewed as the most significant interpersonal dimensions of value.  The research further shows that though warmth is judged before competency, and even provides the grease for most relationships, the attribute of warmth can be maintained without constant reference to it.  At the same time, not all skill development requires warmth, agreement or much in the way of impression management. In other words, competency without warmth can be quite successful as long as there are occasions of warmth in the relationship.

In significant contrast, many business writers, psychologists and HR people look at this issue solely from the perspective of employee emotions, and from that sainted, though often irrelevant annual performance appraisal.  A case in point is the HBR article by Jackman and Strober, Fear of Feedback, an article belonging to the 20^th century rather than today’s world.  The writers have nothing to say about the issues of talent development, organizations’ recognition that success without adequate talent is impossible in the new economy and management’s new responsibility for talent development.  You can be damned certain that most line managers today will look at the issues of feedback through the lens of organizational need, not feelings of fear. 

As a result of global business and the marketplace, many notions about feedback are being drastically revised including the issue raised by this blog’s question.  In the 21^st century, it is ultimately nonsense to be especially concerned about how people perceive you when you ask for developmental feedback.  There are a number of reasons why concerns about how you’re perceived when you ask for feedback are misplaced.

Your boss owes you feedback.  Though most managers hate giving feedback, they also recognize that it is a responsibility not to be shirked.  Indeed, execs are not only talking to their managers about feedback but providing feedback coaching for them. 

Over the last 15 years, execs have come to understand that their responsibilities are three-fold:  strategy development and execution, picking the ideas to fund or to kill in order to maintain competitive advantage, and talent management. 

Regular feedback is advantageous to the company.  Business lives within a Darwinian world and organizations know two things about the global marketplace:  the economy places an enormous premium on brainpower, and there is not enough to go around.  Without knowledgeable experts an organization is at risk. 

Developmental feedback is an imperative for personal growth.  The research on deliberate practice by Ericsson and others emphasizes the absolute need for feedback in the development of expertise.  It has also been known for years that the process of feedback is the only adequate means for behavioral correction and growth.

- - - - - -

Last month I commented on a post that addressed the question, "How will I be perceived if I ask for feedback?"  It's normal, the writer said, to be afraid of how you will look asking for it.  "Will I look insecure?  Needy?  Like I can't wait for the formal review process?" 

Although I have little doubt that the vast majority of professionals have those concerns, I took on the author’s statements with a couple comments.  I indicated my awareness that we all have a different psychological "set" that makes it easier for some to ask and more difficult for others.  Then I followed through with a second question:  "what does it take to get to the place where you don't really give a damn what people think about you asking for feedback?"

The writer responded by chiding me for my question--with another question:  "Do you really want to get to a place where you 'don't really give a damn?'"  And then she answered her question: "Caring what people think about us is normal human social behavior, imagine if we truly didn't care. . . the problem comes when we let caring what other people think stop us from doing what we know will serve our best interests."  My response to her question is, “I do,” and to her statement, “I agree.”

Her statements, however, contain two forms of fallacious reasoning.  In asking me whether I want to “get to the place where. . .,” she is engaging in an ad hominem argument.  Essentially, she attempts to discredit my statement by appealing to my person rather than dealing with the substance of my question.  Second, she generalizes the notion of the need for a positive personal impression to every situation, even though she backs off slightly in her state regarding behaviors that “serve our best interests.”

How we’re perceived by others is part of being a member of the human race, and a process in which often we try to control the impressions others form of us.  In business, impression management is goal-directed.  Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, most business people do not spend the majority of their work hours concerned with issues of self-interest.  Furthermore, that conventional belief will not stand up to the scrutiny of research.  In the main, most business people concern themselves with the execution of their jobs and the eventual success of their organization.

The majority of people overdo the issue of impression management precisely because they’ve been taught to do so by statements like those I received for my comment and question.  Illustrated by the above writer’s approach, some won't take a step or even take care of themselves without checking in to make certain that it's OK.  This "caretaking" recommendation is misleading and wrong-headed.  In counseling, activities focusing on being liked in all situations known as caretaking, is viewed as "enabling," and it is an attribute typical of drug addicts and alcoholics.  (That’s an ad hominem argument, but still important to be stated.) 

Sometimes it’s strategically important to manage our impressions.  At other times, it's a waste of my work hours, gets in the way, and a "tough shit” attitude is most appropriate.  Again, does it matter how you’re perceived when you ask for feedback?  So rarely, that it deserves no attention whatsoever.  Just go on and ask.

P.S.  The following is a related post:  Circumventing Managerial Resistance

IS THERE A REALLY SECURE JOB IN ANY ENVIRONMENT?

Probably not.  Although the recession has given us new insights to the question, it has not been serious enough to really test the question.  The unemployment of the 1930s depression was in excess of 25%.  That's a lot more than our current 8.6% with only 4.4% of college educated unemployed.  It's pretty clear, though, that some jobs are more secure than others and there's a simple test to distinguish between secure jobs and jobs that may get outsourced or obliterated. 

Alan Blinder, the well-known Princeton economist, argues that the "crucial distinction" in the new labor market is not between those with more or less education.  Instead, he concludes that those whose services can be delivered over the internet are in a far less secure position than those whose services must be delivered in person or on site.  As Blinder puts it, "you can't hammer a nail over the internet."  Nor can Indians who live in India replace your bathroom tile.  This model, of course, says a lot for going into the trades, or into many sales positions.

If you're more interested in the cubicle of a major corporation, the distinguishing factor, as I've indicated on numerous occasions, is high quality people skills.  The best jobs go more and more to those with a strong functional technology plus solid people skills.  Over the years I've watched numerous professionals in all the business functions get sidelined because of inadequate relationship skills.  Indeed, the research at the Dallas Fed confirms my observations in spades about the role of people skills.   

The good news is that people skills are grown, not born.

DID YOU LIKE "ANGELS AND DEMONS?"

I did.  But then, I'm a nut for fast moving action that takes place in Europe.  For some reason, Europe in the movies is usually a lot more interesting than the States.  So when the New Yorker came with a review by David Denby, I was curious to know how he'd pan the movie.  Not bad, overall.

You can always count on an intelligent review in the New Yorker although a lot of times I'd prefer either a thumbs up or down. . . and that would handle the matter.  I read Dan Brown's "Angels" (the book) several years ago, right after "Da Vinci Code," which I thought was a hoot.  Better and faster than Ludlum, but not as well written or developed as John le Carre's stuff.  The filmed Da Vinci Code was a bore, but "Angels" was great fun, almost a nail-biter.  Just consider it "escape time."

Back to David Denby.  I was curious to know whether the Vatican actually let Angels be filmed in their archives, and Denby knew the answer.  Nope...the Vatican archives were rebuilt in a Hollywood studio, and the Churched, miffed by "The Da Vinci Code" refused Ron Howard access to the Vatican for Angels and Demons.  So. . . get this. . . Howard recreated St. Peter's Square in the parking lot of the Hollywood Park racetrack.  There's something ironic about that.

Denby did himself good in his review: 

Apart from conspiracy theories, who really believes in hokum like Dan Brown's?  Gullibility and pockets of anti-Catholic feeling are too simple as explanations for the worldwide appeal . . Something more complicated is going on in which, precisely, not believing--the enjoyment of humbug, the crazier the better--is part of the turn-on.  If these movies made any dmaned sense, the public response might be no more than a yawn.

I don't know about you, but sometimes plain old hokum can be a damn lot of fun.